Optimus One Pillar of the Ming Dynasty

Chapter 70 No. 60 Funny moments in the examination room
With two veterans, Yin Zhengmao and Zhang Juzheng, in charge, Wang Daoqiu and Fatty didn't bring anything prohibited. They passed the inspection smoothly and were led into the examination room by the guards.

The Gongyuan managed by the Ministry of Rites is much larger than the Gongyuan in Zhejiang Province. There are more than 1 rows of small cells with only three walls and a roof and no doors.There are one hundred houses in each row of less than two square meters, and the house numbers of the houses are assigned according to the combination of numbers of the heavenly stems and earthly branches of "Heaven, Earth, Xuanhuang".

On Wang Daoqiu's examination card, the house number marked is "Xuanzi No. [-]".According to the number on the test card, Wang Daoqiu found this dormitory.Looking from front to back and left to right, the location is good. It is far away from the noisy noises and the alleyways where people often walk around. It is very quiet and suitable for souls to leave the body.

Walking into this dormitory, there is almost no difference in size from the dormitory in Zhejiang Gongyuan. It is four feet wide, five feet deep and eight feet high. That is, Dayao can just touch his head when he comes in, and Pan Changjiang can just touch his head when he comes in. Lie flat on your back.

There is no difference in size, but the bed still has northern characteristics, that is, the kang.Although the size of this kang is a bit small, and Wu Dalang's figure may not be able to lie flat, it is still a kang after all, and it is a warm kang!
Of course, in order to keep the candidates warm, in addition to preparing kangs for the candidates, the Gongyuan also prepared a briquette briquette stove and twenty briquettes for each dormitory. This made Wang Daoqiu very proud.After all, these two things were brought into this world by him.

The General Examination is the same as the Provincial Examination. After all candidates have entered the dormitory, the "Lock-up Tribute Examination" will be held. Since Zhejiang Province, where Wang Daoqiu belongs, is the dominant province in the examination, the order of entry is In the front, this means that Wang Daoqiu has to wait in the dormitory for candidates from other provinces.

After getting up early in the morning, lining up and being searched, Wang Daoqiu felt a little like peeing.So he rang the bell at the door and called the invigilator to come over and take him to the toilet.

Each dormitory in the Gongyuan is less than two square meters in size. More than half of the space is a kang, and the remaining space is only half a square meter. It needs to store the briquette stove, briquettes, and three days of food, so there is another room. There's really no room for the toilet.

So a simple small shed was built in the examination room at the end of each row of dormitories, with three large dung buckets placed in it for the one hundred candidates in this row of dormitories to solve the problem of the cycle of grains during the three-day examination period. question.

Wang Daoqiu followed the guard, but he hadn't even reached the simple toilet in his row yet!Then he saw Jiang Zhijian, a fat man with a fat face, looking at him as if he was hopeless.

Made!The fat man was assigned the legendary "stinky number", and this kid had a really hard life.Three large excrement buckets have to carry this row of dormitories and the "grain cycle" of one hundred candidates every day. The smell, the sound of going to the toilet, if you sit next door and listen to it, that feeling...!
What's even more terrible is that according to the regulations of the Ming Dynasty, during the provincial examination and the joint examination, once all the candidates have entered the venue, the door of the Gongyuan will be locked from the outside, which is the so-called "Locked Courtyard Tribute Examination".Moreover, during the examination period, even if there is a fire in the Gongyuan, people outside cannot go inside to put out the fire, and people inside cannot escape, otherwise it will be a death penalty.

To put it bluntly, as long as the gate of the Gongyuan is locked, whoever dares to open the lock or enter or leave the Gongyuan before the end of the exam will lose his head. This is the seriousness of the ancient imperial examination.

However, since internal and external traffic is strictly prohibited, the exam is serious, but unlucky guys like Fatty who are assigned to the "stinky number" will be miserable.You must know that the Gongyuan gate is closed for three days, that is, the "big and small" things in the simple toilet also need to be piled there for three days.

One toilet is in charge of one hundred candidates in a row of dormitories. If one candidate has one large toilet and five small toilets per day, one hundred candidates will have [-] piles of "big toilets" and [-] "small toilets" in three days. ".There are so many "big and small" piles next to you, and there is no door to isolate the toilet from your dormitory, so what about this smell and sound!Just thinking about it makes people despair!
So now the fat man was sitting there with a look of despair on his face, but Wang Daoqiu was helpless in this regard. He could only suppress his gloating, not laughing, and not adding salt to the fat man's wounds.

After walking into this simple toilet and quickly solving his personal problems, Wang Daoqiu hid his face from the fat man and left quickly.

After returning to his dormitory, adhering to the principle of never sitting down if he could lie down, Wang Daoqiu put his quilt on the kang and fell asleep, which could be regarded as catching up on the early sleep this morning.

After sleeping until three o'clock in the morning, Wang Daoqiu was awakened by a dazzling beam of sunlight that slanted into the dormitory.

Rubbing his eyes, he became drowsy.He saw a few pieces of paper pressed with an inkstone on his simple wooden table.I picked it up casually and saw that it was the test questions for this exam, as well as several test papers and scratch papers.It must be that a guard came to hand out test papers just now. Seeing that I was sleeping soundly, I didn't worry about it!
The content of each exam in the Ming Dynasty Examination is the same as that in the Provincial Examination, and each exam lasts two days and three nights.The first exam will start on February 28th, the second exam will start on February [-]th, and the third exam will start on February [-]th, and the results will be released on February [-]th.

This will make up for the content of the first exam, which is the same as the first exam of the provincial examination, which is a test of four books, five classics and eight-legged prose.Among them, the Four Books of the Zhou Dynasty have three meanings, and the Five Classics of the Zhou Dynasty have four meanings.These seven questions test the candidates' basic mastery of the Four Books and Five Classics as well as the commentaries of various schools. They are similar to the basic knowledge examinations of later generations, and the answers are unified.

Among them, the standard answer for "The Four Books" uses Zhu Xi's Zhu Xi's annotations; the Yi Jing uses Cheng Zhuan and Zhu Zi's original meaning; the "Book of Songs" uses Zhu Zi's collected biographies; the "Chun Chun Qiu" uses Zuo's, Gongyang's, Gu Liang's three biographies and Huan Guo's , Zhang Qiachuan; "Book of Rites" with sparse annotations.In addition, the "Complete Collection of Four Books and Five Classics" promulgated during the Yongle Dynasty was the unified textbook compiled by the Imperial College and the prefectural, prefecture, and county schools, and the standard answer for the first exam of the imperial examination.

Look at these four books, five classics and eight-legged essays, how abnormal the exam is!The examiner randomly picks out a sentence or a word from the nine books of the Four Books and Five Classics, and you have to answer which book and chapter it is taken from, what it is about, and what the designated teaching materials are. How to interpret this sentence or word.

Nine books, the Four Books and the Five Classics, plus a bunch of officially designated commentaries on these nine books.With this amount of rote learning, there is no doubt that 90.00% of the human brains in the world do not have enough memory to download so much information.Even those people with a large amount of brain memory, who have worked hard for no less than ten years, memorized and deepened their impressions over and over again, will not be able to challenge the eight-part exam.After all, the human brain is different from a computer. Downloaded information will be lost very quickly.

Therefore, although the content of the eight-part essay examination has no practicality, as a selection method, it can perfectly select those smart and diligent people from the crowd.

As for this kind of exam, you may pick some so-called nerds who can only take exams, so what does it matter?Are nerds just nerds?In the imperial court, those who write official documents and manage archives, from the Imperial College to the prefecture schools and county schools, don’t these nerds be what these national education departments need?In a word, the normal operation of a country's administrative system requires both practical talents and nerds.

So this stereotyped selection of scholars, it is really Comrade Zhu, a genius-level pioneering work that day, and it is the most perfect way to select talents in the past 5000 years in China, and there is no one.

Thinking of Comrade Lao Zhu's genius that day, Wang Daoqiu picked up these seven questions from the Four Books, Five Classics and Eight Parts.Looking at those questions, Wang Daoqiu didn't care. He waited until the middle of the night when the moon was high and the wind was dark.

So after reading the test questions, Wang Daoqiu continued to press the test questions under the inkstone, changed his head to a place where the sun could not shine, and continued to sleep.

What Wang Daoqiu didn't know was that not long after he fell asleep, the examiner of this session, Sun Chengen, accompanied by several fellow examiners, came to inspect the examination room.

When Sun Chengen and other officials, who were very dignified, walked slowly to the door of Wang Daoqiu's residence with their hands on their belts, they saw Wang Daoqiu huddled on the kang like a worm.He dared to sleep soundly in the examination room in broad daylight. This was so degrading and made Mr. Sun angry.

You must know that Sun Chengen, whose name differs from Wu Chengen, the author of "The Story of the West Lake", is only one character. He currently lives in the Ministry of Civil Affairs, Zuo Shilang, and is in charge of Zhan affairs. He is an old-school scholar with high moral character and good personal ethics. , is an absolutely moral gentleman, standing proudly.

During the reign of Emperor Wu Zong, because he could not bear the chaos of the imperial court and was unwilling to violate his own conscience and collude with sycophants to cater to the emperor, he resigned in the ninth year of Zhengde and returned to his hometown. It was not until the 16th year of Zhengde that Emperor Jiajing succeeded to the throne. He came back to be an official.

Moreover, Sun Chengen, the old man, was deeply appreciated by Emperor Jiajing during the Jiajing Dynasty. He successively served as the Bachelor of Academic Affairs, the Minister of Rites, the Left Minister of the Ministry of Personnel, and even after this examination, he will be promoted to the Minister of Rites.

Throughout Sun Chengen's official career, no matter which level he reached, he never followed others' influence and was willing to be honest. He had the pride and obvious characteristics of a traditional scholar-bureaucrat.

So now he saw that Wang Daoqiu didn't hurry up to solve the problems during the day, but slept in the dormitory instead, he was angry, and he wanted to reprimand Wang Daoqiu.

At this moment, behind Sun Chengen, Gao Yi, the fellow examiner for this joint examination, grabbed him and said in a low voice: "Sir, sir, I know this examinee Yi, who is Jieyuan who took the Zhejiang Provincial Examination last year. He was the one who was stripped naked by the man who wanted to catch his son-in-law at the gate of Zhejiang Gongyuan! A few days after he arrived in Beijing, he sued Xia Yan, his former chief minister, to the imperial court..."

"Well, I remembered, it's him! He's a talented person, and he's also a man of backbone. Since Xia Yan reached a high position, he really has no moral character at all. Someone should teach him a lesson. OK. Now, let our Jie Yuanlang sleep, he is qualified to sleep."

(End of this chapter)